Olga's Gallery

Gabriele Münter began her professional training at the Art School for Ladies in Düsseldorf, Germany; the School gave woman some art education and prepared art teachers.  Gabriele was not quite satisfied with the training, but the doors of state art academies were closed for women at the time. In 1901 she came to Munich and entered the newly opened Phalanx School, the class of Wassily Kandinsky.

Their pupil-teacher relations soon grew into an intimate bond. Gabriele remained Kandinsky's common-law wife until 1914.
Kandinsky, tired of the affair, used the beginning of the First World War as a pretext to finish the relation.

Most authors take it for granted that Gabriele preserved the style, to which Kandinsky came in the early 1910s, only following him. Though there are also authors, e.g. Germaine Greer, who doubt it and suppose that, on the contrary, Münter's vision of the world influenced Kandinsky's style of the period dramatically.

When the Nazis came to power her work like that of her modernist contemporaries was condemned as degenerate. In her last years she tried her hand in abstract compositions. The largest collection of her pictures the Lenbachhaus in Munich has.

Related article:
Three Wives of Wassily Kandinsky

Bibliography:
The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists by Erika Langmuir, Norbert Lynton. Yale Univ Pr, 2000.
Naive and Outsider Painting from Germany and paintings by Gabriele Münter. Museum of Contemporary Art.
Gabriele Münter by Prestel. Prestel USA, 2002.
Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter: Letters and Reminiscences 1902-1914 by Wassily Kandinsky, Annegret Hoberg, Gabriele Munter. Prestel USA, 2001.
Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter by Annegret Hoberg, Wassily Kandinsky. Prestel USA, 1995.
Kandinsky and Münter